by Scott Duff
Brothers
Legacy of the Twice-Dead God
By Scott Duff
Copyright 2014 Scott Duff, all rights reserved
Cover design by Jonathan Okarku
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication
To Eileen Patricia Butler, who would not let me back down.
Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Epilog
About the Author
Chapter 1
My lungs burned as I broke free from the brush and skidded to a halt in the road. My arms and legs were numb from beating against bushes and small tree limbs. I knew it would only last as long as this adrenaline surge, though, and then it’d hurt—all the tiny cuts and scrapes. I took off again; I had to catch up.
I used the firebreak road instead of cutting across the forest, even though it was little more than a rutted path in the dark. At least it was a path I could see in the moonlight. At the top of the hill, I stopped again and looked around. The lake was a thin ribbon of darkness to the south behind me in the moonlight. I snorted a laugh at that, chest still pumping, trying to catch my breath. Big outdoorsman, I can locate a huge lake by sight.
Then I saw a flash of light nearby and perked up. That had to be them. I took off down the road again. I crested another small hill and swerved, barely missing a small tree, tripping through the brush. I crashed into the ditch on the other side. The pick-up truck roared past me before I could pick myself up, so I just lay there for a moment.
The dust hadn’t settled back onto the road yet when I got up. The adrenaline was playing havoc with my emotions as I looked down the road the truck had taken. They were supposed to be my friends and they’d ditched me in the middle of a forest in the middle of the night. At first, I felt like I belonged, then pitied, then I got angry. Anger won the day, though. Anger bubbled around inside of me until it was a red-hot ball of fire.
How could they do this to me? They were supposed to be my friends! I threw the heat of my anger at the embankment across the road, just like it was a baseball. I threw it with all my anger and frustration attached to it, and even though there was nothing in my hand, a red hot ball of fire flew from me and hit the ditch hard, sending dirt and debris high into the air with a soundless explosion. I just stood there, dumbfounded, as the dust and dirt covered me, mixing with sweat and blood to create mud all over me. Ick.
“That is going to cause one awful headache soon,” said a voice behind me.
I jumped, startled. I put my hands up, ready to fight, even though I knew I couldn’t fight my way out of a wet cardboard box right then. Too tired. Been running a long time.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, shouting at the dark figure in the road. The man stood about fifteen feet away in the darkness. The moon was to his back so I couldn’t see his face very well, but he was a big man, about six feet four, and muscular. Very muscular. He had long hair plastered to his head and a beard helping to hide his face in the shadows. He was wearing a light colored T-shirt and jeans. It looked like he was bare-footed.
“Kieran,” he replied in a deep baritone. “Were you trying to hurt them?”
“What?” I stammered. The question surprised me. “Who?”
“The boys in the vehicle,” he said, fairly softly, “Were you trying to hurt them? Or was your fury meant only for the drainage ditch?”
“No,” I said, subconsciously relaxing a little, turning back to the road, “I was trying to stop them from leaving me in the middle of a national forest.” I ran my hand through my hair, feeling the dirt and grit collected there. I really needed a bath now.
“Why would they do that, if they were your friends?” asked Kieran.
I turned back to him for a second and now he seemed closer. I hadn’t heard him move, but still, he seemed closer, bigger, even. “I don’t know,” I said, “It could be bunch of different things, I guess.”
I thought about it for the first time. I didn’t really know why and there could have been a number of different reasons. Not that I actually understood any of them. Definitely not what my father called “The Good Ol’ Boys Network.” For all I knew, I could have looked a little too long at a girl one of them liked. Or, I had money and they didn’t. I thought it was just good natured fun on their part when they started throwing firecrackers around at the campsite. I didn’t think that much of it—it was kind of fun. When Jimmy pulled out the M-80s and everybody centered on me as the target, I still didn’t think much of it. I just ran for the trees. I was having fun.
They didn’t know I had my own “firecrackers” available. It was the only trick I knew how to do, and I could do it pretty well, too. I could fill a little pocket in my head with light or sound and throw it. I’d learned it from watching one of my tutors teaching his kid to do it years ago at home. I wasn’t supposed to be there, though, and he stopped immediately once he saw me, shooing me away back into the house. So I practiced in secret.
When I was hiding in the trees, Billy saw me toss one of my little flash-bangs at Pitch—I have no idea how he got that nickname—ten feet away from me. Of course, there was nothing to see in the toss until it exploded at Pitch’s feet, scaring the hell out of him. I hadn’t seen Billy there, but I heard him tear through the underbrush in retreat, then the M-80 he’d just lit exploded where he’d dropped it. I hadn’t realized he’d seen anything, so I just ran deeper into the woods and back toward a stream that fed into the lake, laughing the whole time.
I stopped at a hilltop after a few minutes of silence in the woods and peered back the way I came.
Orienting on the river, I found our campsite and saw Jimmy, Billy, and Pitch throwing everything of value into the back of the pick-up rapidly. That memory brought me back to here.
“I was just looking for a few friends,” I said tiredly, mostly to myself but I’m sure the man heard me. Mostly because he was a lot closer than he was a moment ago. A lot closer.
I took a half step back and asked, “What did you mean by ‘that’s going to cause an awful headache’?”
“You’ve been throwing around a lot of energy,” said Kieran gently, “and that last bit was highly emotionally charged. Your body is going to object to that soon.”
He stood a little outside of arm’s reach now. I could see his face a little better but it was still shrouded in darkness. His teeth flashed white when he spoke. His arms hung loosely at his side and he made very little movement, except apparently, when I wasn’t looking at him.
“You’ve been watching me,” I said, disconcerted. This strange man has been watching me from the woods. I didn’t like that. It was more than a little scary.
“For the last hour,” he said. I barely saw him nod in the dark. He went on, “Yours is the brightest aura for several miles, outshining your friends’ like the moon to the stars.” He raised his left hand to indicate the sky. From my perspective, it looked like he was holding the moon up himself. I wondered if he had intended that or if it was purely coincidental. Had to be the latter.
“So what are you doing wandering around a national forest in the middle of the night gawking at little boys?” I asked, suspicious.
Kieran snorted out a laugh, then said, “I’d hardly call any of you ‘little boys’ and I am a little lost.”
“That makes two of us, then,” I said, trying to hold back the sarcasm but not succeeding very well.
“And I saw the mark of my kinsmen on you,” said Kieran, cocking his head slightly as he looked at me.
“What mark?” I asked, suspiciously. I didn’t have any birthmarks and certainly no tattoos.
“On your aura,” he said, “You bear the mark of the Pact.” He watched me as he said this, gauging my reactions. I didn’t know what to make of him. I knew what an aura was, because I could see them surrounding people. My mom and dad’s, for instance, were both really bright and vibrantly colored. This guy, though, didn’t show anything. Might as well have been a rock on the ground.
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“Curious,” he muttered. Raising his right hand to shoulder height, a soft blue energy flowed from his fingertips. “This is the Pact sigil,” he said, as the neon-like energy flowed and pulsed into a form I recognized from one of my father’s books, his genealogy book. He kept it locked in a drawer in his desk and I’d only seen it once. The image pulsed in my mind and for the first time a space opened for me in my head. That’s what it felt like anyway. A huge cavern in my head just opened up and there sat a duplicate of what this man was showing me, sitting at the bottom like a gleaming jewel in the dark. I gasped as I “touched” it in my head. It was far more beautiful than the one in front of me and it felt like mine. Wholly mine.
“My father called that his family crest,” I said quietly.
“It’s a bit more than a family crest, though it is hereditary,” said Kieran, sounding amused as he dropped his hand to his side. The sigil of blue began to fade from sight slowly. “I would very much like to meet your father, if that could be arranged.”
“Perhaps,” I said, not wanting to say I hadn’t seen my parents in over half a year.
“Yes, I suppose a measure of trust is in order,” Kieran said. I more heard the grin than saw it. “Draw up your Sight, Pact-man, and look at me.”
“If you mean check out your aura,” I said with chagrin, “been there, done that. You ain’t got one.”
“What?” he said, shocked. “But you should see my natural aura…” As he spoke the words, I was battered, and I do mean battered, with the image of his aura, brighter than anything I have ever seen in my life. If it was real light I was seeing, I bet my retinas would have been scorched.
“…my Pact sigil…” he continued, and I caught the image of his Pact sigil, just like mine, blazing in blue on the afterimage of his aura. Just the sight of it said Not Yours to me, but it was still beautiful. My own sigil hummed in resonance with it.
“…and symbol of the Pact I carry,” he finished. I caught my breath on the next image. I had no idea what it was, besides old—it reeked of old. And danger, and beauty beyond words. It was very well protected by the Pact sigil below it. I knew that from all the blackness around me. And the pain. Maybe that was the gravel in the back of my head from hitting the ground that caused the pain. I really don’t remember falling.
“You’re all right, boy,” Kieran murmured in my ear. My head was in his lap and my whole body was tingling. “I’ve got you, just relax for a moment.”
I felt a push of energy from him, soothing the pins and needles that had started in my legs. The cuts on my arms stopped nagging me, too. My headache started to recede. I didn’t remember even starting a headache. The energy seemed to ebb out of me and Kieran helped me up. I was right—he was barefooted.
“What happened?” I asked, rubbing my temples at the half-remembered pain.
“I was going to ask you,” said Kieran, his hand on my shoulder, steadying me still.
“Last I remember, I was seeing your aura, the Pact sigil, and your Pact with freaky intensity,” I said, shifting away slightly. I wanted some room between us. “Just for a flash, anyway, and it hurt.”
“That is… odd,” he said, thoughtfully. “What’s your name, so I can quit calling you ‘Boy’?”
“Seth,” I answered. He gave me one name so I stuck to that.
“Okay, Seth,” Kieran said, “Where are we?”
“Bankhead National Forest,” I said, “I can’t get more specific since this is the first time I’ve been here and I really don’t know anything about it.”
“Huh,” Kieran grunted. “Try less specific, then.”
I wasn’t sure what he was looking for here. I decided to go the smartass route. “Alabama,” I said, not remembering which county. That seemed to shake him. He turned back along the road and pointed to the lake in the darkness.
“How long has that been there?” he asked.
“What? Lake Smith?” I asked, confused. “I don’t know, maybe eighty, ninety years. I think that’s what I read about them damming up the rivers.”
“Well then,” he said, rubbing his hands together briskly. “We may not be as lost as I thought. Damnably clever of the old ghost.”
“What?” I asked. Clever of me, I know.
“Come along, now,” Kieran said. “We just might have you home by sunrise.” He took off down the gravel road at a pretty good pace. I had to hurry to catch up. I wondered what his feet were made of to handle this road so easily without shoes. He didn’t seem to flinch at all. He veered off the road onto a firebreak path a couple of hundred yards down, so I followed close behind.
“Do your parents know you’re out here?” he asked without preamble.
“I haven’t seen my parents in over eight months,” I said. Crap. That slipped. Kieran stopped and I stopped a step later. I tried to keep my emotions in check. Tonight had already been a roller-coaster ride and I didn’t want to lose it in front of this guy, this stranger. But if he could see my aura, he probably knew…
“Haven’t seen them?” Kieran prompted me, seeming concerned. I tried to build walls around myself before I answered but I didn’t know if it was enough.
“Yeah,” I said, as stoically as I could muster, “Both left on business trips about eight months ago. Our family lawyer came to Savannah about two weeks later and moved me to a house between Huntsville and Scottsboro. Said my parents would come there to get me when they were through with their business. I haven’t seen them since then. Their cell phones have been cut off. I don’t have a way to get in touch with them.”
“Well, Seth,” he said when he pulled away, “My problems have waited years to resolve, they can wait a bit longer. I think we can see to yours first.” He put his arm on my shoulder and started walking through the woods again. He started off slowly, letting me collect myself, I think.
“We’ll need to move a little quickly through here,” he said. Detaching himself from me, he jumped in between two trees, pulling my arm as he went. It made me a little dizzy for some reason. As we moved into the canopy of the forest, it got darker, which confused me. We were too close to the lake to be under the canopy. I hurried to catch up, trying not to think about it. I looked up to see him on the other side of a small box canyon. Startled, I stopped. Suddenly, he twisted me around by the shoulders to face him, and then I was on the other side, too. I shook my head, disoriented, and looked across the canyon. I could have sworn I was over there a second ago.
Kieran pushed me between my shoulder blades and I took a step… directly into the lake. I backpedaled into Kieran, who chuckled at my confusion.
“We took a few shortcuts,” he said, mildly. “It’s easier on you, the first time, if you don’t know what’s happening.” He stood at the shoreline looking out over the darkened lake. The moon was in descent; it was going to get really dark soon. He put his hands together like he was praying, mumbled something I couldn’t hear, then pulled his hands apart, fingers splayed. Tendrils of yellow energy played between the fingers of each hand. I was watching real magic performed and I was in awe of it. Why I wasn’t scared to death, I wasn’t sure.
The tendrils coalesced into a ball in front of him, growing larger as he let the energy collect. When it was as big as a softball, I suppose he was satisfied because he brought his wrists together, fingers still splayed, and shoved the ball out over the lake. The ball shot out, veering left and right, searching for I don’t know what, but it dove under the surface in the middle somewhere. Kieran stood by the shore watching the darkness, wrists still together and yellow energy still arcing between his fingers.
